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With prime minister Stephen Harper’s decision to call an election last week, Canada has now launched into a 13-week campaign that ends on October 19, when voters will elect all 338 members of the House of Commons, the lower house of the Canadian parliament.

By American standards, where Republican presidential candidates will gather for their first debate nearly six months before a single vote is cast (for the nomination contest, let alone the general election) a 13-week campaign is mercifully short. In Canada, however, it’s twice as long as the most recent campaigns and, indeed, longer than any official election campaign since the late 1800s. But the major party leaders have already engaged in one debate — on August 6.

Plenty of Harper’s critics suggest the long campaign is due to the fundraising advantage of his center-right Conservative Party. Harper, who came to power with minority governments after the 2006 and 2008 elections and who finally won a majority government in 2011, is vying for a fourth consecutive term. He’ll do so as the global decline in oil prices and slowing Chinese demand take their toll on the Canadian economy, which contracted (narrowly) for each of the last five months.

Energy policy and the future of various pipeline projects (such as Energy East, Kinder Morgan, Northern Gateway and the more well-known Keystone XL) will be top issues in British Columbia and Alberta. Economic growth and a new provincial pension program will be more important in Ontario. Sovereignty and independence will, as usual, play a role in Québec — though not, perhaps, as much as in recent years.

In reality, the battle lines of the current election have been being drawn since April 2013, when the struggling center-left Liberal Party, thrust into third place in the 2011 elections, chose Justin Trudeau — the son of former Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau of the 1970s and 1980s — as its fifth leader in a decade. Trudeau’s selection immediately pulled the Liberals back into first place in polls, as Liberals believed his pedigree, energy and sometimes bold positions (Trudeau backs the full legalization of marijuana use, for example) would restore their electoral fortunes.

Nevertheless, polls suggest* that two years of sniping from Harper about Trudeau’s youth and inexperience have taken their toll. The race today is a three-way tie and, since the late spring, it’s the progressive New Democratic Party (NDP) that now claims the highest support, boosted from the NDP’s landslide upset in Alberta’s May provincial election. (*Éric Grenier, the self-styled Nate Silver of Canadian numbers-crunching, is running the CBC poll tracker in the 2015 election, but his ThreeHundredEight is an indispensable resource).

With the addition of 30 new ridings (raising the number of MPs in Ottawa from 308 to 338) and with the three parties so close in national polls, it’s hard to predict whether Canada will wake up on October 20 with another Tory government or a Liberal or NDP government. If no party wins a clear majority, Canada has far more experience with minority governments than with European-style coalition politics, and the Liberals and NDP have long resisted the temptation to unite.

Canadian government feels more British than American, in large part because its break with Great Britain was due more to evolution than revolution. Nevertheless, political campaigns have become more presidential-style in recent years, and the latest iteration of the Conservative Party (merged into existence in 2003) is imbued with a much more social conservative ethos than the older Progressive Conservative Party. The fact that polls are currently led by a left-of-center third party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), also demonstrates that the Canadian electorate, which benefits from a single-payer health care system, is willing to shift more leftward than typical American electorates.

Provincial politics do not often portend changes in federal politics, but the 2015 election is proving to be influenced by political developments in Alberta, Ontario, Québec, Manitoba and elsewhere, and many provincial leaders have not been shy about voicing their opinions about federal developments — most notably Ontario’s Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne.Continue reading In Depth: Canada’s general election→

In the United States, self-proclaimed ‘democratic socialist’ Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont running for the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nomination, has hit his stride this month — Politico proclaimed it a ‘socialist surge.’

Notwithstanding the thousands of supporters thronging to his campaign events across the country, Sanders holds a very slim chance of defeating against his opponent, former first lady, New York senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

In Canada, however, it’s a different story.

The leftist New Democratic Party (NDP) has surged to a polling lead, giving its leader, Tom Mulcair, a legitimate chance to become Canada’s first NDP prime minister. Make no mistake, if the NDP wins Canada’s October election, it would be a huge milestone for the North American left.

ThreeHundredEight‘s June polling averages give the NDP a slight edge, with 32.6% to just 28.6% for prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and 26.3% for the Liberal Party. The NDP has a healthy lead in British Columbia and in Quebec, is essentially in a three-way tie in Ontario, leads the Liberals in Alberta and the prairie provinces (a Tory heartland) and leads the Tories in Atlantic Canada (the only remaining Liberal heartland).

On these numbers, the NDP could emerge as the largest party in the House of Commons, though probably not with an outright majority.

It is, of course, still early — the election is more than three months away. But it’s a remarkable reversal of fortune for a party that only recently languished in third place.

It’s an aphorism of Canadian politics that federal trends don’t extrapolate from provincial trends. But there’s no doubting that the election of Rachel Notley in May as Alberta’s premier has much to do with Mulcair’s recent good fortunes. Notley’s Alberta NDP displaced the Progressive Conservative Party after 44 years in power — and sent Jim Prentice, a Harper ally and former federal minister, who returned from private-sector life to lead Alberta’s ailing PC-led government, back into retirement.

Under the leadership of Jack Layton, the NDP made its first major breakthrough in the 2011 elections. With voters unenthusiastic about Michael Ignatieff’s leadership of the center-left Liberals and with Québec voters in particular tiring of the pro-independence Bloq québécois, the NDP won 103 seats, including 59 of Québec’s 75 ridings. It was enough to make the NDP, for the first time in Canadian history, the official opposition. Tragically, Layton died of cancer less than four months after the election, depriving the party of a figure whose personality and integrity were a key element of the so-called ‘orange crush.’

Mulcair, a moderate with aims of winning over moderate as well as progressive voters, won the leadership in March 2012, dispatching Brian Topp, his more leftist rival. A French Canadian who got his start in the rough and tumble of Québec’s local politics, Mulcair served for 13 years in the provincial assembly and won plaudits as the minister of environment from 2003 to 2006 under Liberal premier Jean Charest. Mulcair made the jump to federal politics during the 2007 election, easily winning a riding from Outremont.

With the Liberals stuck in rebuilding-mode, the NDP took the lead in many surveys throughout 2012. But with the election of Justin Trudeau as the new Liberal leader in early 2013, the NDP’s support tanked — to just barely above 20% in many polls. That’s essentially where Mulcair’s NDP remained for the rest of 2013, 2014 and early 2015. Continue reading NDP rises to lead as Canadian election approaches→

When she was elected in September 2013 as Norway’s new conservative prime minister, one of Erna Solberg’s top priorities was to bring down the value of the Norwegian currency, the krone.

Boosted by its spectacular oil wealth, Norway is today one of the world’s wealthiest countries, so strong that it’s shunned not only eurozone membership but accession to the European Union altogether. Like many other oil-producing countries, however, the sudden drop of oil prices since July from over $100 per barrel to nearly $60 today has adversely affected Norway’s economy. If prices drop even lower, or the $60 level sustains itself through 2015 or beyond, it could endanger Solberg politically, who leads a minority government consisting of her own center-right Høyre (the ‘Right,’ or the Conservative Party) and the more controversial Framskrittspartiet (Progress Party), a more populist, anti-immigrant party that has its roots in the anti-tax movement. The Progress Party’s leader, Siv Jensen, now holds the unenviable task of serving as Norway’s finance minister as oil prices tumble. Solberg ousted the popular two-term prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, who is now NATO secretary-general.

But for a country that was facing inflationary pressure when the rest of Europe continues to battle deflation, the fall in oil prices may bring additional benefits to a country long topping the list of the world’s most expensive places. As of July 2014, Norway still led The Economist‘s ‘Big Mac Index‘ — the price of the iconic McDonald’s sandwich was a whopping 61% higher in Norway than in the United States.

There’s no doubt that a sustained fall in oil prices will harm Norway’s bottom line. It will reduce the revenues available for public spending (already estimated to fall by over $9 billion because of the price drop), and it could easily cause Norwegian GDP growth to fall in 2015 from estimates of 2% or so (still robust compared to the eurozone), thereby causing the country’s relatively low 3.4% jobless rate to climb.

But it’s also caused the krone to fall to a 13-year low, declining to parity with neighboring Sweden’s currency, the krona, for the first time since 2000. As recently as May, one US dollar was worth 5.8 Norwegian kroner. Today, that’s skyrocketed to 7.5 kroner and, as Russia and other oil-exporting countries see their own currencies tanking, investors could push the krone even lower.

After a first-round scare, Juan Manuel Santos won reelection to a second four-year term as Colombia’s president Sunday, delivering a narrow defeat to Óscar Iván Zuluaga and, perhaps more significantly, Santos’s one-time mentor and now opponent, former president Álvaro Uribe.

Though Santos (pictured above) served as Uribe’s defense minister, and won election as president in 2010 with Uribe’s blessing, the former president broke with Santos by opening negotiations with the leftist guerrilla group, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). Uribe won support throughout the 2000s from a wide swath of Colombian voters for his aggressive stand against FARC, other guerrilla groups and drug cartels.

Zuluaga, who won the first round of the presidential election over a divided field, indicated that, if elected, he would impose incredibly harsher conditions on the FARC talks — so harsh that they would almost certainly halt the progress of that FARC and the Santos administration have made.

On Sunday, Santos narrowly defeated Zuluaga by a margin of 50.94% to 45.01%. Santos has the support of a coalition of major parties, including the Partido Liberal Colombiano (Colombian Liberal Party) and the Partido Social de Unidad Nacional (Social Party of National Unity, ‘Party of the U’) that once supported Uribe. Zuluaga was supported by Uribe’s newly formed party, Centro Democrático (Democratic Center) and significant segments of the Partido Conservador Colombiano (Colombian Conservative Party), which had backed Uribe and Santos in the past.

Make no mistake — Santos’s reelection is good news for Colombia, good news for the entire region and good news for the United States, which has devoted significant resources to stabilizing Colombia in the past three decades. If there’s any lesson to be learned from the chaos in Iraq over the past week, it’s that insurgencies ultimately require political, not just military, solutions. Military force can subdue and repress internal dissent, but ending a domestic insurgency demands some form of political engagement.

Santos, throughout the campaign, demonstrated that he understands that in a way Uribe and Zuluaga don’t. Though Santos made his fair share of errors as a first-term president, his victory is cause for optimism that the Colombian government will ultimately reach a political settlement with FARC (even on the same day that Colombian security forces launched a successful operation against FARC on election day).

In the final days of the campaign, there was a sense that Zuluaga might, after all, back down from his hardline stance on the FARC talks, which began in late 2012 — 48 years after FARC’s creation.

But you don’t necessarily have to disavow the sometimes controversial aspects of uribismo to acknowledge that the FARC negotiations are a necessary next step. The Colombian military, first under the Uribe administration, and then under the Santos administration, was vital in bringing FARC to the negotiating table, and the current peace talks are, in many ways, the natural progression of Uribe’s successful efforts to marginalize FARC.

Obviously not the hard-core separatist agenda that premier Pauline Marois did such a poor job of concealing from voters. As soon as a potential referendum on independence became the central issue of the election, Marois’s Parti québécois (PQ) immediately lost its polling lead.

Obviously not the market-friendly approach to government that François Legault champions. He’s now failed twice to convince Québec’s voters to elect the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) into government.

Despite its massive win in today’s election, it’s not obvious that the Québec electorate was so incredibly excited about returning the Parti libéralduQuébec (Liberal Party, or PLQ) to power just 18 months in opposition. The Charbonneau Commission, appointed during the previous Liberal government of premier Jean Charest, hasn’t even finished its inquiry into allegations of corruption related to the awarding of (mostly Liberal) government contracts.

Imagine, instead, if Québec voters had a fourth option — a party with the social democratic credibility that the CAQ lacks but without the PQ’s separatist agenda and without the baggage of last decade’s Liberal governments?

That’s right — a province-level party of the New Democratic Party, or the Nouveau Parti démocratique du Québec (NPDQ).

The big headline from Sunday’s congressional elections in Colombia is the return of the powerful conservative former president, Álvaro Uribe, who won election to the Colombian Senado (Senate).

But the bigger story is more complicated — and the truth is that each of the two major camps in Colombian politics has something to be happy about from the weekend’s elections, which were conducted in the shadow of two important upcoming elections — a recall election involving Gustavo Petro, the leftist mayor of Bogotá on April 6 and a presidential election on May 15 (with a potential runoff to follow later in the summer).

Uribe (pictured above) has carved out a space where he now leads the main opposition to Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos, demonstrating his enduring popularity and his determination to play a role in Colombian governance, despite his ineligibility to run for the presidency in the future. It will make Colombia’s congress a much livelier place, to say the least, and it will require Santos (or his successor) to work hard to maintain a working majority in the Colombian congress, and especially in the Senado.

Santos, however, should be delighted that his coalition suffered only marginal losses to Uribe’s forces. Despite Uribe’s gains on Sunday, Santos remains the heavy frontrunner in the upcoming May 15 presidential election. That’s in part because Uribe himself is barred from reelection, so Uribe’s new party is supporting former finance minister, Óscar Iván Zuluaga, who has far less popularity and charisma than either Uribe or Santos.

You can think of Colombia politics today as a competition between two major blocs — a centrist/center-right coalition that supports Santos and a more conservative bloc that supports Uribe. In addition, there’s a minor bloc of leftist parties that today find themselves largely outside the mainstream of Colombian politics, with the exception of the Colombian capital, Bogotá.

Uribe formed the Centro Democrático (Democratic Center) last year, and he ran on the slogan of ‘mano firme, corazón grande,’ or ‘firm hand, big heart,’ campaigning in opposition to Santos’s high-profile push to negotiate a lasting peace settlement with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). While Uribe should be happy with the results of the senatorial elections, it’s clear that the ‘Uribe bloc’ is still far smaller than the ‘Santos bloc,’ which includes three major parties:

The Partido Liberal Colombiano (Colombian Liberal Party), once Colombia’s largest center-left party, has converged with the other parties in the Santos-led coalition, pulling it ever closer to the center-right in recent years. The party split over whether to support Uribe, who began his political career in the Liberal Party. Though it fielded separate presidential candidates in both 2006 and in 2010, it will support Santos in 2014.

The Partido Social de Unidad Nacional (Social Party of National Unity, ‘Party of the U’) is a conservative party formed in 2005 by Liberal uribistas, and the ‘U’ once stood as much for Uribe as for ‘unidad.’ It became Colombia’s largest party in the Uribe era, and it now forms the backbone of Santos’s coalition.

Cambio Radical (Radical Change), founded in 1998, became increasingly important over the course of the 2000s, and it formed part of Uribe’s presidential majority in the 2000s, just as it today forms part of Santos’s presidential majority. Like the Party of the ‘U’ and the Liberal Party, it will support Santos in the upcoming presidntial election.

The major swing vote between the two blocs is the Partido Conservador Colombiano (Colombian Conservative Party). Like the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party dates back to the 1840s, and it was once Colombia’s chief center-right party. It’s currently part of Santos’s coalition, but it’s the weakest link among the four parties that have backed Santos since 2010, and it’s the likeliest source of future support for Uribe. Though it supported Uribe in 2002 and 2006 and Santos in 2010, it is fielding its own presidential candidate in 2014, Marta Lucía Ramírez, a former senator and defense minister between 2002 and 2003. That hurts Santos by depriving him of the Conservative brand (though only a few Conservative lawmakers have actually endorsed Ramírez), but it also hurts Uribe and Zuluaga by dividing the conservative opposition to Santos.

Uribe guided Colombia’s transition from a country paralyzed by drug-related violence into a more secure, economically vibrant regional leader between 2002 and 2010, backed by the military and economic aid of the US government. Despite efforts to run for a third term, Uribe bowed out of the presidency in support of Santos, his defense minister. Santos (pictured above) easily won election in June 2010, king nearly 70% of the vote in a runoff against Bogotá mayor Antanas Mockus, the candidate of the Partido Verde Colombiano (Colombian Green Party).

As Colombia prepares to vote in parliamentary and presidential elections in the first half of 2014, the mayor of Colombia’s capital city of Bogotá, former M-19 rebel Gustavo Petro, was removed from office yesterday in a government action that could have wide-ranging implications for Colombian politics, including the ongoing peace negotiations between the administration of president Juan Manuel Santos and FARC, the leftist guerrilla group.

Colombia’s inspector general Alejandro Ordóñez, an ally of conservative former president Álvaro Uribe, ordered Petro’s removal on the basis of abuse of office in respect of a showdown with Bogotá’s garbage collectors last year. Ordóñez ruled that Petro (pictured above) violated constitutional principles by attempting to replace private contractors in December 2012 with a city-run force — garbage piled up in the streets for three days, but the contractors ultimately returned to work. Ordóñez’s ruling claims that Petro’s actions during the showdown were unconstitutional and that, in addition to Petro’s removal from office, Petro should also be banished from Colombian politics for 15 years. The United Nations representative in Colombia has called for a meeting to discuss Petro’s removal, expressing concern for the potential violation of the rights of Bogotá citizens who elected Petro mayor two years ago.

It’s all caused somewhat of a controversy in Bogotá, given that the mayoral position is the second-most important elected position after the Colombia presidency. Petro and his leftist supporters have taken to the streets in protest, aghast at what they believe is a politically motivated decision by a right-wing official. Ordóñez last year removed Piedad Cordoba, a leftist politician with ties to former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, from Colombia’s Senado (Senate), banning her from public office for 18 years.

Petro’s ‘destitución‘ could affect both the ongoing negotiations in Havana between the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), as well as the upcoming May 2014 presidential election. His removal could discourage FARC leaders from agreeing to a final political settlement if they believe that Ordoñez and Colombia’s political elite are willing to revoke the results of a free election and remove a former guerrilla leader from a position of political power. Petro, even if banned from holding public office himself, could also find himself with more free time to help mobilize a united leftist alternative to Santos.

Petro won the Bogotá mayoral election in October 2011 in a marquee race — Petro took 32.2% of the vote, narrowly defeating Enrique Peñalosa, a member of the Partido Verde Colombiano (Colombian Green Party) who previously served as mayor from 1998 to 2001 and who won 24.9%. Former Colombian senator Gina Parody, with the support of another former mayor, Antanas Mockus, won 16.7%. Mockus, a bearded and bespectacled Colombian of Lithuanian descent, who briefly launched his own campaign for mayor in 2011 after resigning from the Green Party, is perhaps most well-known as the Green Party nominee for president in 2010, though he lost the runoff to Santos by a wide margin.

Though Petro has appealed the decision, Ordóñez’s office will hear the appeal, so it’s unlikely that Petro can legally reverse the decision. His removal comes after Samuel Moreno, Bogotá’s mayor between 2008 and 2011, was removed from office in relation to improprieties in city contract appropriations, and he remains in prison pending trial for corruption — after coming to office with the lofty promise of building a subway system for Bogotá, Moreno quickly began handing out contracts to his friends and associates. Petro’s misdeeds, by contrast, seem relatively less serious. Though if the removal holds, Santos will be entitled to appoint an interim mayor until new elections will be held early next year.

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Suffragio attempts to bring thoughtful analysis to the political, economic and other policy issues that are central to countries outside of the US -- to make world politics less foreign to the US audience. Suffragio focuses, in particular, on those countries and regions with upcoming or recent elections.